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@Riot - Why use Adobe Air?

Making PVP.net on AIR was one of those many early game development mistakes Riot made as inexperienced and young developers.
For instance their server-side software was so horrible and unable to scale that it took over a year of work to make EU stable and still they had to split it.

is the AIR implementation using windows built in IE for rendering as well I think someone mentioned somethign about that but I could be completely wrong, however if so. I feel like that opens up even more area for bad memory management as well (*******ized JS running through hidden IE that can be multiple version of a JS engine).

I Think i heard there's a way to distro air apps that use webkit, which at the cost of 5-10MB in a patch when updated would at least ensure everyone's on the same rendering/js engine, which probley would help in diagnosing issues like these.

And again if I'm completely off oh well lol I'm currently a web dev on a x-browser project that has to support multiple IE's and is heavily dependent on a js lib that has many more speed/memory/cpu issue in various IE's than anything else, which is where I'm coming from with this, so if you are stuck with air this may help.

I've said this before, i'll say it again. What LoL was written in was good for the time it was written. It suited the needs and did what was needed. Now times have changed and LoL's needs have changed. A rewrite is the best way to go. It's time.

Problem is we are stuck with air now, it has already been said that in order to move away from AIR all development would have to shift away from the current course.. and with the lackluster feature set we have now DOTA2 would kill LoL.

Awesome, that's the kind of information that is really helpful! I'll pass it on to hohums.

This is from the current patch, correct? We're trying to track down what has changed which made the AIR client start taking a lot more CPU time than it did before.

Unfortunately actionscript is a managed language where you don't really do your own memory management, adobe controls that kind of stuff I believe.

Yes, this is with the current Riven patch. The Talon patch had some high CPU usage also, but not anywhere near this bad. One of the fastest CPUs on the market and the AIR client can peg all six cores to 100%.

@People for a rewrite: The best engineering choice might be to be rewrite if this were some sort of class project. But it isn't.

You have two choices (to my knowledge) when you do a rewrite and neither are pretty: 1) Stop development on your current product and write a new app. You lose business that way. 2) Write the new app in parallel but you end up never releasing the new product because the new app can never catch up with the current one.

@People for a rewrite: The best engineering choice might be to be rewrite if this were some sort of class project. But it isn't.

You have two choices (to my knowledge) when you do a rewrite and neither are pretty: 1) Stop development on your current product and write a new app. You lose business that way. 2) Write the new app in parallel but you end up never releasing the new product because the new app can never catch up with the current one.

During that game it was about eight minutes in, the spike is never at a consistent time, nor does it always shoot up that fast, but it always ends up at 100% by the end of a game.

The tools in the screenshot are Performance Monitor and Process Explorer. You can open perfmon.exe using run in the start menu if you are running a version of Windows Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate. The version of Process Explorer I use is an older one, version 11.33. You can download a newer version from Microsoft's sysinternals website, but I have found that this version is better because the information it displays is raw data and more compact while the new version is more flashy but doesn't show you as much on a single tab.

Adobe AIR is an awful platform, compounded by the fact that Adobe Flash Builder and Adobe Flex are horrible tools that may as well have been programmed by monkeys pounding their heads into a keyboard.

During that game it was about eight minutes in, the spike is never at a consistent time, nor does it always shoot up that fast, but it always ends up at 100% by the end of a game.

The tools in the screenshot are Performance Monitor and Process Explorer. You can open perfmon.exe using run in the start menu if you are running a version of Windows Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate. The version of Process Explorer I use is an older one, version 11.33. You can download a newer version from Microsoft's sysinternals website, but I have found that this version is better because the information it displays is raw data and more compact while the new version is more flashy but doesn't show you as much on a single tab.

Adobe AIR is an awful platform, compounded by the fact that Adobe Flash Builder and Adobe Flex are horrible tools that may as well have been programmed by monkeys pounding their heads into a keyboard.